Encounter with Agnieszka Holland
The current president of the European Film Academy, Agnieszka Holland, will be present at an encounter with the ZINEBI audience after she collects her Mikeldi of Honour Award at the Festival’s inauguration ceremony. Scriptwriter and director Ángeles González-Sinde, formerly president of the Academy and minister of Culture, will be interviewing her amid spectators in the Auditorium of Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum, which will screen one of the films Holland feels is a key component of her trajectory: The Lonely Woman (Kobieta samotna, 1981), which she completed just before the state of emergency was declared in Poland.
Fortunately for her, Holland was promoting one of her films outside the country when martial law was declared in December 1981, and so the director decided not to go back to Poland, and settled on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
It would be six years before The Lonely Woman would see the light of day, because public screenings were banned by the regime headed up by Wojciech Jaruzelski – as was the case with many other critical films that began to emerge in Poland in the early eighties. A film on loneliness, on the search for affection, forms part of Poland’s “Cinema of moral disquiet” movement launched by Holland alongside some of the country’s leading directors, such as Krzysztof Zanussi, Janusz Kijowski and Krzysztof Kieslowski.
